Mormon Studies Commons^™

The First Vision As A Prehistory Of The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints, Kathleen Flake

BYU Studies

Most scholarly attention to the First Vision is dedicated to determining whether it happened or whether whatever happened is reliably described in the few primary accounts we have of it. My interests lie in a different direction. I am interested in the First Vision accounts insofar as they tell us something about religion, not about history, and not least because my wager is that this story, as a story, exceeds the limits of history, especially when it becomes understood as scripture. Which is to say, I want to better understand the work done by this story among the members of …

Raising The Stakes: How Joseph Smith’S First Vision Became All Or Nothing, Steven C. Harper

BYU Studies

Joseph Smith (1805–1844) inhabited a visionary world and belonged to a visionary family.¹ At about age twelve, he began to worry about his soul and started searching the Bible. As he compared the scriptures to the Christian denominations where he lived in western New York State, he found discord. For two or three years, he worried about “the darkness which pervaded the minds of mankind.” He became “exceedingly distressed” and “convicted” of his sins, a problem compounded by his inability to find any “society or denomination that built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the new …

The First Vision And The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints, Elder Legrand R. Curtis Jr.

BYU Studies

I am grateful for the opportunity to be here with you. As was mentioned, I am the Church Historian and Recorder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In our Church, that position is an ecclesiastical calling. While I oversee the Church History Department—which is filled with trained historians, librarians, archivists, and other professionals— my own training is as a lawyer, and prior to being called to full-time church service as a General Authority, I practiced law for several years. My service as a General Authority has included being in the presidency of the Church’s Africa West Area …

The First Vision Of Joseph Smith Jr.: 200 Years On, Richard E. Bennett

BYU Studies

This special issue of BYU Studies Quarterly features the proceedings of a conference held at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of Joseph Smith’s First Vision. In presenting slightly modified transcripts of the papers delivered at this conference, we hope BYU Studies Quarterly readers will gain insights into both this experience of Joseph Smith’s and the various ways scholars have come to view it.

“Wissenschaft Des” Mormonism: Jewish Studies As A Framework For Exploring Mormon Studies, Trevan Hatch

Faculty Publications

Recently, a significant amount of attention has been directed at the who, what, where, and how of Mormon studies. For example, since 2009, at least six major forums, comprising sixty-two essays and presentations (with dozens of other stand-alone pieces appearing in other venues), were dedicated to discussing the nature and future of Mormon studies as an academic field. Many of these essays discuss the definitions, challenges, opportunities, research gaps, sources, and disciplines of Mormon studies from a variety of angles. Some are highly nuanced treatments of particular aspects of Mormon studies, and others are more general. This article presents the …

Church And The Fourth Estate, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Church and the Fourth Estate (2020) directed by Brian Knappenburger.

Israelite Inscriptions From The Time Of Jeremiah And Lehi, Dana M. Pike

Faculty Publications

The greater the number of sources the better when investigating the history and culture of people in antiquity. Narrative and prophetic texts in the Bible and 1 Nephi have great value in helping us understand the milieu in which Jeremiah and Lehi received and fulfilled their prophetic missions, but these records are not our only documentary sources. A number of Israelite inscriptions dating to the period of 640–586 b.c., the general time of Jeremiah and Lehi, provide additional glimpses into this pivotal and primarily tragic period in Israelite history.

Recovering The World Of The Bible, Dana M. Pike

Faculty Publications

The pillar of light that fell upon Joseph Smith in the woods near Palmyra, New York, in the spring of 1820 ushered in a new dispensation of the gospel.1 But that light, which shone “above the brightness of the sun” (Joseph Smith–History 1:16), did not just enlighten the world as far as religion is concerned. The light emanating from the pillar in which the Father and Son stood symbolically represents the latter-day, divine illumination of many aspects of life on this earth—past, present, and future.

Subject Vertical File, Mcgarvey Ice

Center for Restoration Studies Vertical Files Finding Aids

No abstract provided.

Are We Not All Beggars?, Michelle Forstrom

The Restored Gospel and Applied Christianity: Student Essays in Honor of President David O. McKay

Michelle describes how her brother in law’s stroke and her home’s foreclosure helped King Benjamin’s words “Are we not all beggars?” from the Book of Mormon became especially poignant for her.

Multiplicity: An Editors’ Introduction, Quincy D. Newell, Benjamin E. Park

Mormon Studies Review

When J. Spencer Fluhman introduced the new Mormon Studies Review six years ago, he articulated a “guiding principle for the Review: friendship.” As Fluhman put it, “In our hope to meaningfully connect minds across space, time, and ideological and religious spectra, the Review aspires to a very Mormon ideal indeed.”1 We’d like to believe that over the last six years, the Mormon Studies Review has lived up to this aspiration, and that it has demonstrated that friendship is an excellent way to cultivate the field of critical inquiry we call Mormon studies, regardless of participants’ religious identities or institutional commitments.

Seek Ye Words Of Wisdom, Stephen D. Ricks, Donald W. Parry, Gaye Strathearn, Shon D. Hopkin

Interpreter Foundation Books

Stephen David Ricks is a professor of Hebrew and cognate learning in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he has taught for almost four decades (1981–). It was at BYU, in a freshman Book of Mormon class, that he first met Shirley Smith. Four years later, after they had both served German- speaking missions (Stephen in Switzerland and Shirley in Southern Germany), they were married in the Provo Utah Temple in 1974. They are now the proud parents of six children—three girls and three boys, all of whom are married—and have twenty …

Review: E. Marshall Brooks. Disenchanted Lives: Apostasy And Ex-Mormonism Among The Latter-Day Saints. New Brunswick, Nj: Rutgers University Press, 2018., Sara M. Patterson

Mormon Studies Review

In a February 1990 newsletter from the Southern California chapter of Saints Alive in Jesus/Ex-Mormons for Jesus, an anonymous author wrote: I am currently a Mormon who is searching for answers. So far, my studies have led me to have serious doubts about Mormonism, however, I am so fearful and emotionally distraught over leaving the religion that it’s sometimes difficult for me to think rationally. I have been a member for 25 years (I am now 34) and I have 4 children who are very involved in LDS activities. All my friends (most of them anyway) are members and my …

Review: Seth Perry. Bible Culture And Authority In The Early United States. Princeton, Nj: Princeton University Press, 2018., Candy Guther Brown

Mormon Studies Review

The Bible in America and American bibles have generated substantial scholarly interest. In writing about early American bible culture, Seth Perry has stepped onto well-trodden ground. The field has been cleared and ploughed by many important studies, including Paul Gutjahr’s American Bible and Book of Mormon, David Nord’s Faith in Reading, Candy Brown’s Word in the World, John Fea’s Bible Cause, Mark Noll’s In the Beginning Was the Word, and Lincoln Mullen’s America’s Public Bible.1 Perry builds on this scholarship (citing all but Brown in the bibliography) and contributes novel insights, but Bible Culture’s findings are not radically disruptive. Readers …

Review: Richard Neitzel Holzapfel And David M. Whitchurch, Eds. My Dear Sister: Letters Between Joseph F. Smith And His Sister Martha Ann Smith Harris. Salt Lake City And Provo, Ut: Deseret Book And Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2019., Natalie Rose

Mormon Studies Review

decades of letters exchanged between the sixth church president and his sister from the 1850s to the 1910s. A majority of these letters are provided by Carole Call King, the great-granddaughter of Martha Ann Harris, who had the well-preserved letters in her possession. Following her father’s death in 1993, King inherited several items from her father including these letters that remained in a box left “on a closet shelf ” in her home for some time (xiv). In the box were almost one hundred letters written to her great-grandmother Martha Ann Harris by Harris’s brother Joseph F. Smith, the nephew …

Review: Harvard Heath, Ed. Confidence Amid Change: The Presidential Diaries Of David O. Mckay, 1951–1970. Salt Lake City, Ut: Signature Books, 2018., Matthew Bowman

Mormon Studies Review

The complete diaries of David O. McKay, held in the special collections

of the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah,

run some forty thousand pages long. Such length seems appropriate

for the man who served as president of the Church of Jesus Christ of

Latter-day Saints for nearly twenty of his ninety-six years, from 1951

to 1970. When he was born many Americans believed his church to be

a strange and threatening polygamous cult; when he died Mormons were widely celebrated as model Americans. These pages help us to

understand that change.

About fifteen thousand of those …

University Of Illinois Press

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.

Review: Gregory Prince. Gay Rights And The Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2019., Elizabeth Alice Clement

Mormon Studies Review

With an accessible writing style and startlingly short chapters, Gregory Prince analyzes three aspects of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s engagement with homosexuality in the postwar US.1 First, he carefully traces the evolution of the church’s understanding of the causes of homosexuality and the policies the church developed to address same sex attraction among the faithful. Second, he analyzes the church’s participation in both state and national debates around public policy towards homosexuality, with a particular focus on the campaigns against gay marriage. Finally, he explores the harm the church’s analysis, policy, and public involvement have done …

Review: Daniel P. Stone. William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2018., Christopher James Blythe

Mormon Studies Review

Daniel Stone’s William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet is a biography of a significant nineteenth-century Latter Day Saint “prophet, seer, and revelator.” It is as much a story about the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ in 1850s Pennsylvania as it is an account of the life of this fascinating man. The Latter Day Saint tradition encompasses hundreds of denominations that have a heritage in the Church of Christ founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith. Scholars have spent most of their attention on the largest division of the tradition, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based in …

The Latter-Day Saints And Race Issues In South Africa, Khumbulani D. Mdletshe

Mormon Studies Review

When Jesse Haven and his two missionary companions, all white elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, landed on the African continent in 1853 to preach the gospel in the country of South Africa, they had no intention of preaching to the nation’s black inhabitants. Just the year before, Brigham Young, president of the LDS Church, declared to the Utah legislature that “a man who has the African blood in him cannot hold one jot nor tittle of Priesthood.”1 T hese comments fit the governing ideology of South Africa, where the black majority was treated as second-class …

A Scholar In Zion, Anthea Butler

Mormon Studies Review

When I received my copy of Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy, I stared at the cover for a while. Surely Colleen McDannell did not pick this image, I thought, because the cover is reminiscent of what I would consider to be a nineteenth-century version of Mormon womanhood: a young mother playing with her children, looking down upon them lovingly, seemingly free from care. Thankfully, a) the cover was NOT her first choice for the book; and b) the statue is not quite what Sister Saints is all about.

Review: Hokulani K. Aikau. A Chosen People, A Promised Land: Mormonism And Race In Hawai’I. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2012., Sujey Vega

Mormon Studies Review

I want to begin by referencing a particularly moving scene depicted in A Chosen People, a Promised Land that speaks to the beauty and hardship of what it means to reclaim faith and culture for one’s own. In her narrative, Hokulani Aikau depicts the 2001 launching of the wa’a kaulua ‘o Iosepa, a voyage canoe made by and for Polynesian Latter-day Saints. Long before it was the “latest attraction” to the Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC), this wa’a served an inspiring purpose. Aikau describes in vivid detail the beachside ceremony and the communal effort to set this majestic canoe into the …

Review: F. Lamond Tullis. Martyrs In Mexico: A Mormon Story Of Revolution And Redemption. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 2018., Angela Tarango

Mormon Studies Review

F. LaMond Tullis’s book Martyrs in Mexico begins with an evocative quote from one of the Zapatista executioners of Rafael Monroy and Vincente Morales—that the two men died bravely and “with their boots on” (1). The men faced their execution by firing squad resolutely and refused to repudiate their “foreign” faith. Accused of hiding military weapons for the Zapatistas’ enemies, the men stated the only “arms” they harbored were their copies of the Book of Mormon and the Bible. For this they were executed during the height of the Mexican Revolution.

Review: Irén Annus, David Morris, And Kim Östman, Eds. Mormonism In Europe: Historical And Contemporary Perspectives. Szeged, Hungary: Americana Ebooks, 2018., Mees Tielens

Mormon Studies Review

If books about Mormonism “abroad” (that is, Mormonism outside the United States) have a formula, it tends to be along the following lines: focusing heavily on missionary work, they list dates that missionaries arrive, successes and failures in opening up a country to the gospel, perhaps culminating in the triumphant announcement of or, better yet, the actual building of a temple to prove the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ viability and longevity in that place. Rarely are local contexts taken into account or meaningfully explored; rarely are these books written from anything other than the perspective of an …

Review: Megan Sanborn Jones. Contemporary Mormon Pageantry: Seeking After The Dead. Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press, 2018., Jill Hemming Austin

Mormon Studies Review

Outdoor historical pageants hold a long and steady presence in the informal and grassroots culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There are several reasons for the robust health of this tradition: theology that implicates living church members in the salvation of their ancestors; an enthusiastic proselytizing culture that seeks to spread the good word; and a tendency towards large-group events and performance. In her book, Contemporary Mormon Pageantry: Seeking After the Dead, Brigham Young University theatre professor Megan Sanborn Jones takes on the task of examining four of the largest church pageants in the United States: …

Front Matter

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.

Confronting And Condemning “Hard Doctrine,” 1978–2013, Matthew L. Harris

Mormon Studies Review

Although Spencer W. Kimball’s 1978 revelation in the Salt Lake Temple ended the 126-year-old priesthood and temple ban affecting persons of African descent, questions about racial teachings in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints lingered. The revelation, canonized as “Official Declaration 2” in Latter-day Saint scripture, failed to repudiate the theology justifying the ban.1 Some members, consequently, continued to assert that black people were cursed, equating their dark skin with misdeeds they allegedly committed in a pre-earth life.2 Anguished over these microaggressions, black Latter-day Saints petitioned church officials to condemn racism within the church as well as remove …

End Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

The Teachings Of Church Leaders Regarding The Crucifixion Of Jesus Christ: 1852–2018, John Hilton Iii, Emily K. Hyde, Mckenna Grace Trussel

BYU Studies

From the beginnings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (herein referred to as “the Church”), the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ has been at the heart of its theology. In numerous revelations received by Joseph Smith, the Savior is identified as having been “crucified for the sins of the world” (D&C 53:2; see also 21:9, 35:2, 46:13, 54:1, 76:41). President Brigham Young taught that salvation was only “through the name and ministry of Jesus Christ, and the atonement he made on Mount Calvary.”¹ President John Taylor said that Christ “was crucified and put to death to atone …

Good Grief, Sarah Hafen D'Evegnee

BYU Studies

Having happily served a mission myself, I was convinced that the only tears I would shed when I said goodbye to my oldest son would be tears of maternal joy. However, as his departure date loomed larger on the calendar, the metal harness of time strapped me in, and I felt nauseous as I anticipated the whoosh of the release of air just before being whisked straight upward and then plummeted to certain death—the thrill and the terror of knowing that I had not only signed up for this ride, but I had waited in line and I was the …